Materials Matters Newsletter

July 2005

 Topics:

• Options for Cost Reduction
• Upcoming Local Events
• Something Completely Different – Rube Goldberg

Options for Cost Reduction

Here are some options for cost reduction that are sometimes overlooked:

1) Use common materials for similar parts used across product lines.  This will enable better pricing due to higher volumes being purchased. The first step to achieve this is to determine if there are materials that will meet all of the products’ performance, reliability, and manufacturing requirements.  In many cases, a material is already being used which can meet the needs of all the products.

2) Use lower cost materials that still meet the product requirements.  We have found that many companies pay for more materials’ performance and reliability than required.  The first step is to determine which lower cost materials meet all of the products’ performance, reliability, and manufacturing requirements.

3) Specify more than one material that can be used for a component.  Sometimes material availability can affect the price.  If more than one material can be used, then options for purchasing increase.

Upcoming Local Events

September 23 – 28, 2005

51st IEEE Holm Conference & Intensive Course on Electrical Contacts

http://www.ewh.ieee.org/soc/cpmt/tc1/h2005/h2005top.html

Chicago, IL

October 3-4, 2005

IEEE Product Safety and Engineering Symposium

http://ewh.ieee.org/soc/pses/symposium/

Schaumburg, IL 

September 2005 – May 2006, 2nd Tuesday of each month

Dinner meetings of the Chicago Regional Chapter of ASM International

www.asmchicago.org  (The year’s program will be posted shortly)

Rolling Meadows, IL

Rube Goldberg

Yes, Rube Goldberg really existed.

Rube Goldberg (1883-1970) was a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist, sculptor, and author.  Through his "INVENTIONS", he discovered difficult ways to achieve easy results. His cartoons were, as he said, symbols of man's capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results.  Rube believed that there were two ways to do things: the simple way and the hard way, and that a surprisingly number of people preferred doing things the hard way.

While most machines work to make difficult tasks simple, his inventions made simple tasks amazingly complex.  Rube's drawings depict absurdly-connected machines functioning in extremely complex and roundabout ways to produce a simple end result; because of this RUBE GOLDBERG has become associated with any convoluted system of achieving a basic task.

Go to www.rube-goldberg.com for more information and to see some of Rube’s cartoons.